updated 01:23 pm EDT, Fri May 11, 2012

Baidu to name hardware partners for new Baidu Cloud OS next week

Chinese software giant Baidu, which also runs the country's largest search engine, will reveal a new smartphone partner next week, according to a recent report. The phone will run on Baidu's OS, likely to be called Baidu Cloud. The company has previously partnered with Dell to launch a phone running on the current OS, called Baidu Yi.

"We have a few partnerships coming up and will announce it in a week," said Baidu vice president of engineering and head of mobile Wang Jing, in an interview with Reuters. He would only add that the company was in talks with global handset makers, and the devices would be sold in the Chinese market. The market has the potential to be lucrative, with 356 million mobile Internet users, according to government statistics from the end of 2011.

The VP also said Baidu is trying to bring the OS to a number of devices from different manufacturers and beyond just smartphones, much like Google with its Android OS and Apple with iOS.